Multi Disciplinary Early Performance Evaluation via Logical Description of Mechanisms: DVD Pick up Head Example
Masanori Ozawa, Yumi Iwasaki, Mark R. Cutkosky · 1998
Abstract This paper describes an approach developed to support the early stages of designing multidisciplinary products. In the design of such products it is important for various specialists to share representations of the engineering models they use in making trade-off studies. Sharing information among diverse engineering tools at the data level is notoriously difficult and inflexible. When any of the modeling details, assumptions or constraints change, the translation must usually be rewritten. Our solution to this problem is to formalize the exchange of information among engineering specialists and their tools as a problem in communication among agents. The agents share a common ontology and a compositional modeling language (CML) in which models can be created such that conventions, constraints, and assumptions are defined formally and ultimately grounded in logic. We have applied CML in the context of a pick-up head design problem for DVD (digital versatile disc / digital video disc) players. We describe the pick-up head design problem, the CML models we have created to address early stages of pick-up head design, and the use of the CML models by a team of specialists, each participating as an agent in a concurrent engineering exercise.